Word: gizmo
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Rand's Christmas present to his son is stranger and more wondrous than any of his own inventions: a little animal called a Mogwai, with a kitten's purr and the forlorn eyes of an orphan puppy. The creature, whom Billy's dad dubs Gizmo, arrives with enough warnings to fill a Tylenol label three times over: Keep him away from water; keep him out of the light; and never never feed him after midnight. A few drops of water inadvertently fall on Gizmo, and pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!, five living fur balls fly from...
...were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing 8 ft. to 10 ft. away; "super-faces" were designed for Gizmo and his gremlin archrival Stripe, with some 36 cables that controlled character movement of eyes, brow, mouth and nostrils...
...should I want to save time? I hear you, friend. I hear you. You wonder where it gets you, saving all that time, when you think about old Henry Ford's gizmo that was supposed to save a peck of time. Only instead of conquering the open road, we wound up living on it. You've got a point. You a college boy? But this is the country of the A-bomb and the zipper. We always save time, good and bad. Tempus fugit. Time is money. Most of all, time is dreams. And computers give you time for dreams...
...gizmo-fancying world of local TV news, the helicopter rivals the minicam as the novelty of the moment. Choppers can cost $300,000 or more, but they give some 250 TV station news crews speed and mobility, and serve as remote transmitters for pictures ranging from traffic to catastrophes. But the ratings race can tempt copter reporters to chase sensation, making aerial derring-do part of the story, and to take needless risks...
...networks was the "exit poll" of randomly chosen voters at some ten to 75 precincts per state, for a total of up to 36,000 people per network. The technique was pioneered by CBS Pollster Warren Mitofsky in 1967; since the 1980 primaries it has been a favorite statistical gizmo of all three networks. Voters are handed anonymous questionnaires asking their age, sex, race and political attitudes, as well as which candidates they chose. Exit polling can be intrusive: officials in the state of Washington alleged that CBS aides in Black Lake (pop. 15) and NBC operatives in Bellingham...